Domain Registration and Mapping

October 24, 2006

Matt

It’s here: you can now use your own custom domain with your WordPress.com blog. For example, if your blog was currently at example.wordpress.com you could buy example.com from us and we would automatically move your blog over and redirect all your links and readers to the new domain.

How does this work? Well to get started go to Options > Domains. You can enter the domain you want in the box at the top.

If the domain isn’t registered, it will ask you for some information and then register it for you, and add domain mapping, for $15/yr.

If you already own a domain you registered somewhere else, you can map it for $10/yr. The next screen will tell you how to change the DNS nameservers on your domain to point to WordPress, and once you do that your domain should be live within a few hours.

That’s it!

This is pretty new, and somewhat technical functionality. If you have any questions at all don’t hesitate to contact support using the feedback tab at the top-right of your dashboard, and one of the team will get back to you immediately. Congrats to Andy for his great work on this oft-requested feature.

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Pretty fancy, Andy. I can see this being a pretty big feature. I started a WP.com blog so I could blog about WordPress, so it doesn’t really make sense to me. I like having “wordpress” in my blog’s URL!

0nkulis: we are having some issues with domains outside of .com .net and .org. You will be able to map any domain soon; we aren’t going to support registering them here, but you can still use them if you register them with another registrar.

With regards to the earlier comment about Google Pagerank, it will probably go down for a couple of weeks, but since we have the redirect it will come back. Also all of Google’s links to your old site will work just fine when people click them.

Great work – very impressed! Only issue is it seems that there’s an issue around logging in – I no longer get the ‘bar’ across the top of the screen using my new domain name (which was working within minutes of ordering!), I click ‘Login’ and am taken straight to the admin panel – so I’m clearly logged in already, it seems the admin panel still uses the .wordpress.com address, so I wonder whether this is what’s causing the conflict…

Other than that tremendous – decent price for the domain name too, given that you’re doing the directing too!

Question: will changing to a new domain name mess up our Google search hits, or our Google rank? For some reason I’ve got a Google rank of “5” right now, which I can only guess is because my blog is associated with WordPress. Once I switch to a new domain name, I lose all those positive associations and my Google hits drop, yes?

I just opened 2 new blogs that I’m not ready to start using now, just so I could buy the new domain names that I want to have.

It was pretty smooth. After purchase, you might want to add a line to the directions indicating how long people should expect to wait before it’s working (only a few minutes; but it doesn’t hurt to know that before trying it).

Also, on the new domains, I don’t have the menu bar on the top of the page for dashboards, new posts, etc. I need to go to login to reach the dashboard, and I don’t see anyplace with a menu of all my dashboards. Not a big deal.

I purchased iowaboyblog.com today and it redirected within moments. The process was flawless and fast. However the ‘www’iowaboyblog.com isn’t working. I noticed, while visiting other sites who purchased and redirected domains today, that their sites are redirecting to example.com even when I use the ‘www’ prefix. How can I get this ‘www’ redirect to work on my site?

Even though it costs much more, I’d rather pay for you guys to host than download WordPress onto my server because when it comes to anything programming, I’m stuck. I have another domain which I’ll be hooking to my own server soon, (a friend will be helping me), but that is going to be for my work and I want this to be something completely separate and unrelated. Hehehe, and having a pseudonym is cooler.

Oh, and to everyone else, I’d rather have my own username than a subdomain…:P

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